I asked my mother last night who she was voting for. She is apparently one of the 5-7% of Americans undecided as they walk into the a polling place today. She has always voted Republican but even she hasn’t been able to stomach the last eight years. And she’s certainly not enthusiastic about voting for McCain, who she claims will just “want more wars.” Regarding Obama, however, she is even less enthusiastic.

“I don’t know who he is. I heard he has a grandmother in Africa he doesn’t care for. Just today, he said he doesn’t even know his aunt. What kind of person doesn’t take care of his family? They say he might be Muslim. They say he wants to turn this country into a communist state. We don’t know anything about him. We don’t know what kind of person he is. It’s like he came out of nowhere. ”

To which I answered, “He didn’t just come out of nowhere. He was a senator in Illinois, you know.”

My mother was silent.

“You did know that, didn’t you?”

“Really?” she said. “He was a senator?!”

And so today, my mother, an immigrant and resident of the United States for over 30 years, votes for a President. Her vote counts as much as mine. And today, both of us are taking the same standardized test that we take every four years as part of the “No America Left Behind” test. Whether you are white America, black America, red America, blue America, real America, un-real America, Joe the Plumber America or Joe Biden America, you can choose to take this test and this year’s test is, at least so the reporters keep telling us, a historic and monumental one.

I would agree that this election has been one of the most interesting of my relatively brief lifetime. If you just took the top of the tickets on its own, this election would already be a fine Rob Reiner film. America’s first viable African-American candidate (and first oratorically gifted candidate since Kennedy) versus a war-hero maverick senator who never flew straight or walked straight but always talked straight. And then Sarah Palin happened and suddenly, the campaign seemed to have enough storylines for several reality show seasons. And now, as we come to this test, it seems that the campaign has run as long as Survivor has.

Take away the tassels, the lace, the fringe, the breathless daily storylines and the thrice-a-day poll of polls, and the campaign, judged on substance, has not amounted to anything historic or monumental. Policy-wise, both candidates are proposing tax cuts, all kinds of spending, a way out of Iraq, and ways to increase health care coverage and save social security. Take away the helping-the-middle-class rhetoric from the Obama camp and they might as well be running a Republican platform from the 1980s with a few nostalgic nods to progressives for early childhood medical care or getting out of Iraq. Obama’s platform is coherent, modern, and frankly, relatively moderate. He’s winning in the polls because he’s a gifted communicator, not because he’s had a single original idea.

As for McCain, he must wonder what might have been. What would have happened if he was the coherent Republican, and not Obama. What if he didn’t choose Sarah Palin when she was so obviously ill-prepared? What if he chose to run on the issues instead of choosing to pin his campaign hopes to reminding America who the hell Bill Ayers was? And therein lies the biggest miscalculation of the McCain campaign if he loses today: Steve Schmidt’s failure to recognize that there’s a statute of limitations on the guilty acts of people. If Bill Clinton ran for president again in four years, do you think Karl Rove’s people would be able to energize their base enough to win an election by slinging mud on the Monica Lewinsky scandal? Probably not. No one cares; it was that long ago. That would be roughly twenty years after the fact in 2012. Bill Ayers committed his terrorist act 40 years ago. The only people who care are 1) those old enough to remember the Weather Underground clearly, and 2) crotchety enough to still be outraged by it. That’s not the demographic that’s going to win an election, especially with so many fewer Republicans after eight years of W.

But that said, McCain hasn’t lost yet. Stranger things have happened. I’d put a McCain upset win somewhere between the Giants beating the Patriots in the last Super Bowl and Texas Tech toppling Texas last weekend. In the ”No America Left Behind” four year program, on any given November Tuesday, anything can happen.

So will we pass this test? Will America be left behind by the likes of Germany, Mozambique, Argentina, Liberia, the Phillippines, Ireland, Chile, India, Peru, Fiji, and Bolivia, all countries that have elected a woman or a representative of an ethnic minority head-of-state in the past two decades? The citizens of some of those countries have discovered that while the ethnicity or gender of their heads-of-state may have been groundbreaking, the novelty wears off quite quickly. At the end of the day, it’s still about choosing the best candidate on the question of substance. And on that count, Obama has certainly run a campaign that more than made up for its lack of originality by staying on that little message about CHANGE from the very beginning way back when (oh, I can hardly remember New Hampshire it was so long ago…back when Jeff Probst’s Patagonia shirts were still fresh and crisp).

Now if only I could remember whether Obama is Muslim or not…